Jay Kristoff - Kinslayer

“Two dreadnoughts,” said one.

“Plus the corvettes to run us down,” another spat.

The Kurea ’s captain stood like a stone pillar at the pilot’s wheel, tanned skin and sparkling eyes. He was tall and barrel-shaped, with an enormous braided beard and a long plait streaming out behind him. His voice was a drumming roar over the wind.

“All hands to stations! All hands!” He turned to his first mate, teeth clenched. “Get below. Dump the ballast and any extra weight. Anything that’s not nailed down. Go! Go!”

The crew scattered to their posts, half a dozen heading belowdecks, soon emerging with crates, furniture, ropes and tackle, heaving great handfuls over the side and out into the city below. Michi heard the engines pick up, the four great prop-blades churning the air, tethers and cables groaning with the strain.

“Can we outrun them?” Michi murmured.

The captain glanced at her, slammed the throttle to full ahead.

“Or die trying,” he said.

His bride? Murdered.

His allies? Traitors.

His capital? Ablaze.

All was undone.

Kigen thrashed below him, body charring, skin crawling. Thousands of people fleeing to the city walls, throwing themselves into the bay amidst the flaming ruins of the Dragon clan’s tall ships. Empty motor-rickshaws rolling down the roads, burning as they went. Glass falling like rain. Bewildered bystanders, faces streaked with soot and blood. Stepping aside or crushed underfoot. Fire and dancing silhouettes, a tumult, a discord, arms held to the sky and swaying in the pulse.

Chaos.

Hiro stood aboard the flagship Red Tigress, watching his world crumble to ruin. After the Phoenix attack on the sky-docks, he’d mustered what defense he could, scrambling aboard his flagship as his city burned. Two Tiger dreadnoughts and three Guild ironclads had managed to intercept the Floating Palace on its way into Upside, cut off its assault on the palace proper. But the traitors Shin and Shou had already set fire to half of Docktown, their surprise assault incinerating most of Hiro’s heavy ships and half the Guild fleet while still at berth. Worse yet, the Dragon clanlord and his Iron Samurai had quit the field immediately once news of Aisha’s murder spread among the troops. Daimyo Haruka had returned to the palace to rescue his wife, but Hiro fully expected him to flee the city afterward. He supposed he should be grateful the clanlord hadn’t turned on him too.

This was their notion of honor? Of Bushido? Of the Way? Once the samurai of this nation had believed in something more than themselves. In courage. Service. Self-sacrifice. And yet quicker than lotusflies, both the Phoenix and the Dragons had turned and bared their fangs, their own dreams of rule burning brighter than the houses in Hiro’s capital.

But was he so different?

How pure were his motives for accepting the throne Kensai had dangled before him?

The iron hand at his side clenched, the ashes of funeral offerings caked upon his lips.

“Treacherous bastards all of us…” he breathed.

The Floating Palace loomed above the slaughter, buoyed by swelling thermals rushing up from Kigen’s blazing carcass. With a few more ships, Hiro felt he could have taken on the flying fortress and blown it from the clouds. But, incomprehensibly, Second Bloom Kensai had diverted two Guild ironclads from the battle and sent them chasing the Kagé rebels, now fleeing the city in some Dragon merchantman. Hiro had received reports that the leader of the Kagé had been captured by the Lotusmen—he was already in their godsdamned hands . But Kensai seemed intent on ending the rebellion tonight, once and for all. To the hells with Shima’s capital. No matter if these effete Fushicho bastards turned Kigen into an inferno.

Shin and Shou had sat at his table. He had welcomed them into his city. And now they were burning that city to cinders. But if Kigen was truly his, if the throne, the mantle, the Way held any meaning for him at all, surely he owed it more than a token defense? Surely he owed the people below, his people, all he had to give?

Hiro clenched his teeth, enamel grinding, a burning glare set on the towering sky-ship laying all about it to waste. He turned to the Tigress captain.

“Send word to the Kazumitsu’s Honor .” He nodded to the other Tiger vessel floating off their starboard. “Send to the Guild ships also. Full attack.”

“Hai!” the captain barked.

Engines kicked into the red, the Tigress shuddering as she swung her snout around and lumbered toward the enemy. The Phoenix corvettes were swift to intercept, filling the sky between Hiro and his quarry. Crews manning the Tigress ’s batteries opened up, and chug!chug!chug!chug! came the thunder of the shuriken-throwers. The corvettes returned fire, men on both sides became limp, lifeless meat, washing the decks with their insides, red as lotus blooms. Hiro ducked low, a shuriken whistling over his head, two more spanging off his spaulders and breastplate. A Phoenix corvette dropped from the sky, crashed into the walls of Kigen arena. Another collided with the Guild ship Red Bloom, clipping its inflatable and exploding into flame, the falling ironclad immolating a city block below.

Screams of pain from the streets beneath him. Prayers for mercy.

And there he stood, with none to give.

The Phoenix corvettes came about for a second attack as the Tiger fleet drew within range of the Floating Palace ’s heavy ’throwers. The barrage hit Hiro’s ships like hail in winter’s bleakest hour, tearing holes through the Honor and littering its decks with dead. Another Phoenix corvette burst into flames and exploded in midair, momentum stringing its remnants out along the sky like fireworks on a feast day. Engines roaring, men around Hiro screaming for coordinates, for ammunition, for their mothers, lying in puddles of their own guts and clutching the places their limbs were supposed to be. The air filled with gleaming, hissing death, a tempo and percussion of razor-sharp steel and chug!chug!chug!chug! went the music they all danced to, and when it stopped there was only roaring propellers and cries of pain and lifeless shapes staring at starless skies. Eyes and mouths open. Seeing and saying nothing at all.

“We can’t get close, my Lord!” the captain cried. “Our inflatable is already ruptured! I can’t keep her aloft for long!”

“Get on the radio to Kensai!” Hiro roared. “We need those ironclads back here!”

“They’re pursuing the Kagé, great Lord!”

“To the Endsinger with the Kagé! If these Phoenix bastards decide to destroy Kigen rather than claim it as their own—”

As if bidden, the Floating Palace changed course, swinging away from the Tiger palace and bringing itself to bear on the smoking chimney stacks to the west of the blazing bay.

The refinery …

The ground around the chi refinery glittered with blood-red eyes and firelight reflections, gleaming on the suits of dozens of Guild Purifiers. The Lotusmen were dousing everything in sight with flame-retardant foam, Guild marines spraying burning buildings with black water pumped in from the bay, beating back the inferno from the refinery storage tanks. But if the Floating Palace had any fire-barrage munitions in reserve …

The captain of Kazumitsu’s Honor had sent his ship on a roaring collision course with the Palace, but as she drew close, her inflatable was riddled with heavy ’thrower fire. The ironclad’s return salvo tore great, heaving gouges in the Palace ’s own balloon, but its sheer size and number of hydrogen compartments kept the behemoth afloat, droning toward its target. The air was filled with half a dozen Phoenix corvettes, cutting through the rolling smoke, airborne sparks dancing like fireflies.